TRAFFIC
BLACK HAT ATTACKS —
HOW TO PRE-EMPT
(OR RECOVER FROM) THEM
If you want to maintain your traffic and rankings, you need to inspect your backlinks regularly, advises
Andy Edwards, managing director of Madabout Media
GAMBLING IS A VERY competitive
and saturated market, with hundreds of
companies and websites all bidding for
the same keywords, traffic and players.
Although I myself relish the rivalry and
competition, it’s unfortunate that the old
motto of “there are no friends in business”
is in the minds of so many in this industry.
There are a handful of jealous affiliates,
operators and SEOs out there who can’t
compete on a level playing field and so
resort to underhand tactics to leverage
their existing position in SERPs. These
underhand tactics, in their most basic
form, are black hat links.
Links are still one of the top factors
at the core of Google’s algorithm and
there’s nothing Google hates more than
webmasters trying to manipulate their
position in search results. To prevent
manipulation it created the dreaded
Penguin algorithm, which devalues and
fights spammy link practices. The most
recent update, Penguin 4.0, runs in real
time, which means you can now be
penalised immediately. If Google thinks
your link profile looks suspicious, it can
result in certain pages or even your whole
domain being removed from SERPs.
What does this mean for your
bottom line?
22
iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT/NOV 2017
Loss in ranking + loss in traffic
= a drop in conversions
If you had not been monitoring your
backlink profile for black hat attacks on
a regular basis you would not notice this
sudden drop in traffic until it’s too late.
By the time you do notice, the damage is
already done. And if you do not proactively
remove bad backlinks from your profile and
update your disavow file on a monthly basis
then you will stay where you are and never
regain your ranking.
Identifying bad backlinks
The first thing you must do is a full link
audit, because the backlinks pointing to
your site have the power to propel you to
the top of the search results or drop you
to the bottom. You need to look at your
full link profile and not just a section
of it or some of the links pointing to a
page or pages.
I use various tools to provide the full
list. I tend to use Link Research Tools and
its brilliant DTOXRISK. However, I also
pull the data from Majestic, SEMrush and
Google Search Console into the report
using their APIs. From here the software
creates an in-depth report of all your links
and gives them and your site an overall
toxicity score.
In my experience any score over
1,000 triggers a Penguin penalty, so you
now have the task of going through every
one of your backlinks and identifying
the bad links and black hat attack links.
If you have a normal-looking link profile
that consists mostly of branded terms and
the odd money keyword you may think
this doesn’t apply to you. Well, think
again, because our jealous competitors
can use these terms to make it look as if
you have acquired the links.
Typically underhand tactics include:
purchasing thousands of backlinks for
your brand term using automated tools
such as XRumer. These links can be
bought for as little as $5 on Fiverr and
consist mostly of blog comments on
expired WordPress sites. Another popular
tactic is to use this but also use anchor
text associated with bad neighbourhood
sites. Mostly these will be references to
porn, Viagra and terrorism.
Figure 1 is an example of links posted
on expired or hacked WordPress themes
that point to one of my operator sites,
Touchmobilecasino.co.uk. The hacker
is continually updating these pages with
more backlinks on a monthly basis.
The malicious backlinks inserted into
this content have been carefully crafted